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Monday, November 25, 2013

The Strange Case Of The Layaway Plan

One of the great things about America is the sheer variety of crap one can buy from its retailers. Forget about all the good stuff - delve just a fraction below the surface of normalcy and you'll find all manner of junk just waiting to be purchased by you, the average citizen. And it's not hard to find either - if Walmart or Target don't have it, then CVS or Walgreen's will. We all have those hard-to-buy-for relatives and acquaintances. We've all done the Secret Santa thing. These are two examples of things you don't want to spend a lot of time or money on. So at this time of year (the holiday season, that is - the most wonderful time of the year) nothing comes in handier in these less-than-prosperous times than layaway. You know, layaway - you select a whole cart full of rubbish, take it to the little jolly elf at the back of the store behind the dingy desk, they add it up, you pay a fraction of the cost upfront and they'll hold all that dross for you till about a week before Christmas when you are expected to come in and actually settle your bill and take it off their soiled hands. Time was, a lot of big stores used to do it. Now, it's only KMart. And KMart is the tip-tops when it comes to absolute trash disguised as products. Take a look at this selection below. First there's the pseudo exercise products...

Then there's the handy-dandy kitchen gadgets....

I have no idea.

'Tool' is right.

Then you have the leisure products...

Um, FYI, Schmendrick, you already see in HD.

I actually quite like this one.

The techie crap...

And the just plain inexplicable.

And the beauty part? You could get all of these things and more and put them on layaway. Not just in KMart, but everywhere. But not any more. No no no. And this troubled us Unbelievables to no end. We had noticed the diminishing numbers of stores where layaway was available, so when in 2008 or so Wal-Mart finally said adios to the layaway plan, we knew something serious was afoot. It all came to a head when we received an anonymous letter with the photo below attached with a cheap staple.

The letter simply read, "This is the guy you seek. His name is Kiefer Reef. He killed layaway and hid the body....." which we thought was totally, like, weird, but we investigated the tip straight away. What we found was shocking. I'm sure Michael and Clark will be more than happy to fill you in on the deets later in the week. Till then... ciao, dudes.